Sometimes, on a rather boring and run-of-the-mill Monday, I get news in the submission queue which just puts a gigantic smile on my face. We've talkedabout the Raspberry Pi before on OSNews, and other than reporting that everything's on track for a Christmas launch, it has also been announced that the Raspberry Pi will be able to run... RISC OS. A British educational ARM board running RISC OS? We have come full circle. And I couldn't be happier. Update: Theo Markettos emailed me with two corrections - Markettos isn't actually a representative of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and the quoted bits are transcribed, they're not Markettos' literal words. Thanks for clearing that up!

I use to love RiscOS. My first computer was a Acorn A3000 and I stayed with Acorn until the RiscPC StrongARM.
BBC BASIC was my first programming language and I wrote games for myself, friends and family. It was on the RiscPC I learnt C++ (with gcc). Most advanced thing I wrote on it was a realtime software renderer (all fixed point of course) for a demo/exercise.

BUT even at its birth, really, RiscOS was a toy OS.

"The OS is single-user and employs co-operative multitasking (CMT). While most current desktop OSes use pre-emptive multitasking (PMT) and multithreading, RISC OS remains with a CMT system. Many users have called for the OS to migrate to PMT. The OS also has rudimentary memory protection, and all users have full superuser privileges."

Much as I loved RiscOS, I would much prefer kids learnt Linux. It's a true grown up OS and what they learn will be directly useful at many scales. Fundamentally a Unix is simpler than RiscOS. Everything is a file and system calls are to act on those files. (Yes it's not quite that, (bar Plan9) but that's the general idea.)

Python is better than BBC BASIC ever was. Moving to C and C++ is easy on Linux, fancy IDE or not (and I didn't have one on RiscOS, I just had !Zap).

If your also a RiscOS refugee, just use RPCEmu, it can at least run your old 26bit code.